carpenters, masons, painters, plasterers, plumbers, bakers, butchers, blacksmiths, machinists, coopers, and brass-workers, to say nothing of Jewish bookbinders, boxmakers, engravers, printers, cap-makers, cigar-makers, photographers, upholsterers, and Jewish workmen in dozens of other trades.

The principal occupation is undoubtedly tailoring, and the working-place of tens of thousands of Jews is still the sweat-shop. But in and out of the sweated trades, from the rag-sorter to the high-priced designer, the Jew and the Jewess are making their way in American industry and gaining their foothold.

The

The Jew is also moving up geographically. The contemporaries of Julius Cæsar, the Rumanian, who were intolerably crowded on the lower East Side, have now gone north to the Bronx. deserted tenements are to-day even more congested with newer immigrants, but in another dozen years their present residents will also have moved away.

It is the increase in earning capacity that has permitted this exodus from the old Ghetto. The man who twenty years ago received only twelve dollars a week may still be earning only twelve, or he may be earning two hundred, but his daughters are stenographers and schoolteachers, and his sons are whatever they have the brains and luck to be. The twelve-dollar-a-week man may still be unused to American ways. He may remain a bewildered stranger in the fierce, fast life about him, and find his peace only in the quiet of the somber synagogue, where, in praying shawl, he worships God as did his ancestors thousands of years ago. But the son, for better or worse, is an American; the daughter, though she observes the dietary laws, is not averse to people who do not, and son and daughter conspire to tear their parents from their roots in the lower East Side and carry them to Harlem, to the Bronx, to Brownsville, to the uttermost parts of the city.

This movement out of the old Ghettos of America is more than a mere change in place. It is a progress towards Occidentalism, as was the movement from Europe to America. It is a new immi

gration, another step towards America. It takes the immigrant from the Yiddish tongue to the English language; it brings him into touch with newer and better phases of American life. It is a token of past success and an earnest of future

success.

This success is not only material. From the beginning the Jews have sought every avenue that led to education. The night schools, the public schools, the colleges and universities have received a constantly increasing quota of Jews. In all American cities the Jew, impelled by his racial love of learning, has sought the printed page.

For a time the evils of this Klondike rush for learning were almost as apparent as the good. Thousands of unprepared Jews, temperamentally unfitted for the professions, yet becoming lawyers or doctors because of the accompanying social prestige, failed in the despairing struggle for professional success, and became disappointed and unscrupulous practitioners. With the years, however, a better-trained body of Jews have entered school and university, and every year these men in increasing numbers are graduated and begin lucrative and honorable careers.

At first law and medicine alone attracted the Jew. To-day he goes into dentistry, pharmacy, mechanical, civil, and electrical engineering, art, literature, and pedagogy. In the day and night schools of New York and other cities the Jews are making their mark.

Hundreds of Jewish scientists are working in chemical and physical laboratories, and many Jewish graduates from agricultural colleges are finding occupation in the management of large farms, or in the study of agricultural and forestry problems in the service of State and Nation.

The intellectuals are by no means always the professionals. The sweated presser may have read books which would test the attainments of an erudite Orientalist. There are peddlers, unable to find their way on any street outside the Ghetto, who can unerringly pick a path through the overgrown labyrinth of the Babylonian Talmud, and quote the opinions of a century of rabbis upon a disputed point in casuistry. People who cannot read English know Herbert Spencer by heart, and

men who are ignorant of any language but Yiddish and Hebrew keep in touch with the latest developments of science, art, literature, and the drama. The Yiddish newspapers, an essentially American product, bring a daily library of new learning to their tens of thousands of readers, and the Yiddish drama and the Yiddish books reproduce the new thoughts of the Jews and the new and old thoughts of the world. The intense intellectual life of the East Side is not confined to any one class of people. Nor is it a simple or a uniform group, but a curious medley of susceptible men and women discussing ardently what elsewhere is ignored. In many East Side cafés, away from the chess tables where old men and beardless youths are immersed in their intricate game, you may hear little groups of people discussing idealism and realism, and Zionism and Socialism, and art, music, history, philosophy, and the future of the race. It is all humanitarian. There is underlying this wandering discussion a deep, persistent, fundamental sense of the coming of the Messiah; not a Messiah of flesh and blood, but a new good world in

which human beings can live a human life.

In one of these little cafés, so runs the story, two Russian Jews recently met. "Where have you been last night, Isaac?" asked Hyman.

"In the Cooper Union celebrating the new Constitution of the Turks."

"Were there any Turks there, Isaac ?" "No, just Jews."

A week later the same two Jews met in the same café.

"Where have you been last night?" again asked Hyman.

"In the Cooper Union, celebrating the birthday of the Russian-of Tolstoy." "Were there any Russians there?" "Russians? No, just Jews."

I

F the word "intimate" had not been so cruelly overworked, I should like to say that the new palace of fine arts in the Boston Fenway is the most intimate, the most personal, museum in the wide world. Not even such small private-public museums as the Wallace Collection or Sir John Soane's, in London, give this curious sense of close contact. For there officialdom has driven out the brooding spirit of the collectors; you stray about the rooms with as complete a feeling of detachment as if you were in the grim British Museum itself. But in Boston the wonderful old things in the cases seem to carry an atmosphere of their own and to compel you into it. You find yourself contemplating, perhaps, an ancient soul-house such as the Egyptians before the dynasties placed over graves to shelter the ka, or ghostly body of the departed; and you feel, not cold curiosity merely, but a startled diffidence. "Who am I that I should stand thus gazing into the heart of antiquity?" There is at times an almost lonesome feeling of being iso

lated at close quarters with the Egypt of the Old Empire or with ancient Greece. In the old museum building it was not

So.

Again, in Boston you are all the while acutely conscious that you are looking on humanly cherished possessions. Chinese sacrificial bronzes tended by reverent hands ever since they were made, away back in the third century, seem not to have passed into the soulless clutches of an institution, but to be adopted pets of the curator. Every shimmering rug from the Nearer Orient, every bit of porcelain or lace or iridescent glass, seems to have been set like a jewel with as much loving care as if it were the supreme possession of an impassioned private collector. Commonly, if you think of museum curators at all, it is as beings of a superior race delving in the hidden fastnesses of the building, out of ken of ordinary mortals. Here it is not so much of their technical virtuosity that you think as of their æsthetic affections.

In the old museum building it was not so.